When the world is encouraged to take its lead from a little girl in pigtails who doesn't do her homework, we know that something is up. And when she is warmly applauded by people in high places who have 'unelected, undemocratic, and unaccountable' at the top of their CV, then we can be doubly sure that something is well and truly up.
As it turns out, she needn't have worried. Her dream has come true. The panic is upon us.
There is an arcane corner of Buddhist studies called Abhidharma. I have never delved into Abhidharma very much. It is analytical in the extreme, real head-banging stuff, guaranteed to give me life-threatening migraines. The essence of Abhidharma is analysis and cataloguing of 'mental events', the things that go on in our mind. Furthermore, it may divide these mental events into positive, negative, and neutral categories. I am pretty certain that 'panic' won't be featuring in the list of positives.
Panic is a disastrous basis for human action. It constitutes an extreme rush of emotional energy, one which bypasses all reason and reflection. It is a complete loss of ego control (there are times when loss of ego control is appropriate, but rational decision-making isn't one of them). People in a state of panic are highly suggestible, easy to influence and manipulate. They will act without thinking, and are liable to do, or agree to, extremely silly things. Which is why Greta wants you to panic; and why panic is a major player in the coronavirus crisis.
Until now, climate panic hasn't worked badly. It became officially enshrined in the fabrication 'Climate Emergency'. This constitutes the 'objective pole' to which 'climate panic' is the intended subjective counterpart.
Certain sections of the public have fallen for climate panic big-time: some of the Extinction Rebellion folk, for example; while many politicians and social manipulators have embraced it for their own ends, while their true faith remains doubtful.
There are problems with climate panic, however. To be sustained, it requires a constant flow of lies, distortions, exaggerations, half-truths, and manipulations to keep the public in line. Increasingly sensational stories have to be fed into the mainstream of 'information', which requires an army of 'climate scientists', so-called journalists, politicians, eco-believers, renewables zealots, and the rest to manufacture and get out into the public realm. And, since all the more extreme predictions made over the years have proven to be wrong, a lot of effort needs to go into shutting up those who spy the sad and sorry state of the emperor's clothing.
Coronavirus panic, however, has a lot more going for it. Unlike climate emergency which, despite anything anybody says, remains based upon a theory of catastrophe which is unproved and likely unproveable, it is founded upon reality in the physical world. There actually is a coronavirus. Scientists can see it with their instruments, and we live in a society that places great stock on scientists with little instruments being able to see and measure things. It does undoubtedly cause illness, which is undoubtedly sometimes really horrible. And it undoubtedly leads many people to die. We cannot question the reality and suffering of coronavirus. But we can question the state-and-media-sanctioned response.
Part Two
I have recently been reading a book about some Tibetan Buddhists, focussed around the central years of the twentieth century. These were people who, with the Chinese invasion, fled the high, windswept plateaux of Tibet, escaping southwards to the still harsh Himalayan foothills of Nepal, Bhutan, and northern India. A more different way of life to that of the typical modern westerner is hard to imagine. Much of their lives was spent on the knife-edge separating life and death. Poor and simple in the extreme, keeping a few animals maybe, and subsisting on little more than tea, butter, the occasional other animal product, and tsampa, a simple barley-derived meal.
Survival entailed not only finding sufficient food, warmth, and shelter. The elements were almost uniformly harsh, and much energy was put into placating the local mountain, water, and sky deities. Offerings, ritual, and prayer were an integral part of everyday life.
With sickness, pain, and death never far away, the Tibetans in the book didn't wish to die any more than anybody else. Death held its fear. But I can't imagine these Tibetan folk panicking about it all. Trying it on with them would have been futile. Death was their companion, unwelcome maybe, but not unfamiliar.
Modern western culture renders people uniquely unprepared for crisis, for the prospect of death, for dying. It insulates from inconvenience, hardship. It has created a consciousness in the head, abstracted from the physical, the body, from direct reality. Snowflake mentality of today is simply the logical outcome of the protection and insulation that has only accelerated with the advent of virtual living, courtesy of computer technology.
Modern culture also sits at the foot of scientific materialism. 'Scientists say.....'; 'Modern research suggests....': how tired and nauseated I have become by this procession of the false neo-gods. In its strident atheism and nihilism, the majority western attitude also gives a particular twist to the coronavirus crisis. It holds onto the curious belief that this life is it, is everything. That the mind is somehow the creation of the brain, so that when the brain dies, there remains..... nothing. So a certain panic, despair, and helplessness is likely to accompany any suggestion of Armageddon by epidemic. That's what's being exploited by not-very-nice people and groups today.
Part Three
The media. It's a funny business, isn't it. That very important British newspaper 'The Guardian' has a circulation of around 130,000 copies daily (along with a few paywall subscribers, I suppose), about half the figure for a decade ago. Meanwhile, London Real's recent interview with David Icke on coronavirus had over two million views on YouTube after only three days. Perception is everything.....
My sole comment, really, is that anybody still conferring 'honourable behaviour' to the mainstream media should have been divested of such naivety by now. Maximising fear, uncertainty, horror, and panic has been the characteristic, it seems to me. There have been a few exceptions, but dark stories, worst-case-scenarios, moment-by-moment coverage of yet another death in Italy. I get the impression that a lot of people are just turning off, as a survival mechanism, aside from keeping informed of the essentials. And so they should.
A few days ago I received a circular email from a friend who works in the natural foods business. It gave advice on how to boost our immune systems in the face of this coronavirus pandemic. This coronavirus situation provided a golden opportunity for the mainstream media to do something useful: serious advice on boosting immune systems, for example, or properly thoughtful and dispassionate articles on the bigger picture. But no. The vast majority of mainstream output has been to the diminishment of the individual, not their empowerment.
In my own cursory visits to the mainstream I've seen pictures of coffins lined up in Bergamo. Satellite photos of possible mass coronavirus graves in Iran. As if the mainstream normally gives a shit about the tens of thousands of innocent lives lost in that troubled part of the world over the past decade. I find it ghoulish, obscene. Obscenity is not Jim Morrison pulling out his penis in public (which he never did anyway); it is not this week's new videos on Pornhub. No, it's this attempt to exploit the manipulatable by the manipulators.
And worst of all, there are the 'commentators', the 'opinion writers'. These are generally parasites who don't know any more than me or you, but who get paid for laying out their own narrow, panic-generating opinions. Give them a wide berth.
Part Four
There was a moment, not so long ago, when I made the conscious decision not to be utopian about humanity. Since then, I've been a bit more relaxed about things.
What this means is that I am no longer looking for, hoping for, paradise on Earth. 'Paradise' does exist, but it does not belong in the realm of normal human affairs. Or, if it does, those humans involved will be so transformed as to be barely recognisable as such.
If anything, life as a human being constitutes a test. It's a great testing ground for souls, a kind of laboratory for souls. It is here that we can become magnificent, or we can slip into the sludge-filled pit of existential darkness. The coronavirus situation is a great test for all of us.
This view is born out on the Tibetan Wheel of Life, in the segment concerning 'the human realm'. Here, the human realm is portrayed as a place of this-and-that, good and bad; pleasure and pain, light and dark, all co-existing. It is a place of action, where choice is possible. It is, say the Tibetans, the most favourable place for 'spiritual development' as a result. The human realm: testing, testing.....
Part Five
There are uncanny similarities between the 'improved society' envisioned by Greta-style eco-zealots, and the world as it may reveal itself post-coronavirus crisis. This vision also conforms closely to that modelled in the UN Agenda 21/Agenda 2030. I am just pointing this out...…
In all scenarios, many of those who have embraced, or merely turned up in, western civilisation will find their lives immeasurably impoverished - economically, emotionally, imaginatively, spiritually. It is a world stripped bare of diversity, individual initiative, free thinking and ingenuity. This is all replaced by dull uniformity for the masses, herded into lookalike rude dwellings, coerced into a survivalist mentality. In case of doubt, check out the UN's Agenda 2030; it's easy enough to find.
Funnily enough, the self-appointed saviours and manipulators of the world and myself share moments of concord. In common with some eco nuts, I have been pleased to read that, with the termination of giant cruise liners (for now), Venice is now experiencing clear waters in its canals. This magnificent city with a unique beauty is not built for hordes of day-trippers turning up for a couple of hours to take a few happy snaps before returning to their ocean-going city.
I also find much air travel silly. People flying from Britain to Dubai for a business meeting; crazy. I have friends and family who fly halfway across the world as casually as I catch the bus into town. I find this mad - the human organism isn't designed for such things, and it represents a serious disconnect from our psyche.
And at this point we part company. The UN and environmental zealots see the situation as one which demands authoritarian control. For me, it is a matter of 'individual awakening', of individuals coming to their senses in all manner of ways. This is what I mean by the laboratory of souls; it is a testing place for each and every one of us. Can we rise to the occasion, or disappear down the plughole? Totalitarians, who would impose a 'solution', have no interest in such matters. They seek to close down the laboratory altogether. To put it in permanent lock-down. To diminish the individual human spirit, reduce it to mediocrity, to nothing, to zero. Let us not permit ourselves to be fooled.....
Images: Top: You know who....
Centre: Kullu Valley, n.India, past sanctuary for some Tibetans
Bottom: Titian was always ahead of the game. Social distancing, Renaissance-style
